How much do you know about your heart? Here are a few facts to help you get acquainted:
- The average adult heart beats 72 times a minute. That’s 100,000 times a day, 3,600,000 times a year.
- The heart pumps blood to almost all of the body’s 75 trillion cells. Only the corneas receive no blood supply.
- The body’s system of blood vessels — arteries, veins and capillaries — is over 60,000 miles long. That means they could wrap around the world more than twice.
- The human heart weighs less than a pound.
- Laughter can help your heart. A good, hearty laugh — like the kind that makes you tear up — has been shown to increase blood flow for up to 45 minutes after the laughter.
- Heart disease kills more women than men each year.
- Grab a tennis ball and squeeze it tightly. That’s how hard the beating heart works to pump blood.
- More people die of a heart attack on a Monday than any other day of the week, and most heart attacks occur between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m.
- The ‘thump-thump’ sound of the heart is made by the heart valves as they open and close.
- Three years after a person quits smoking, their chance of having a heart attack is the same as someone who has never smoked before.